It's indisputable, of course, that providing customer service at scale depends on the use of up-to-the-minute technology. Consider the example of Nextiva, the Arizona-based communications company. Nextiva supports some 150,000 clients, including marquee companies like Netflix, Allstate and Delta. Technology is so essential to the ability to serve customers at this level that Nextiva, for which I have done some work, designed and built its own customer support platform (NextOS) in-house rather than going to outside vendors for this functionality. However, says Nextiva CMO Yaniv Masjedi, "although we are driven to use the best and most appropriate technology to serve our customers, we take care to avoid a pattern we've seen elsewhere in the tech community of trying to mold or squeeze customer service to fit into whatever's easiest for technology to handle. It has to be the other way around; the customer has to stay in the center."